A pair of “honor killings” in Texas Updated: The girls were scared of their dad Additional updates

BryanPosted at 6:06 pm on January 2, 2008

The girls were 17 and 18, named Sarah and Amina, and police in the affluent Dallas suburb of Las Colinas say he killed them in his own cab and is still armed and considered dangerous. WFAA-TV in Dallas says that police believe they have him surrounded in a residential area of Lewisville, TV. Now, the details.

They believe the girls’ father, Yaser Abdel Said, is in one of the houses on the block.

Police are also looking at the motives which may have led Said to possibly murder his two teenage daughters, one of whom called 911 from a cell phone near the spot where the girls were later found.

Police say they are looking into the possibility that the father was upset with his daughters dating activities.

“It’s something well worth looking into,” said OFC David Tull of Irving Police.

The man’s wife is fully cooperating with inquiries, police said.

Police said earlier in a statement that the man was a suspect in the girls’ deaths.

Police say they are looking into the possibility that the father was upset with his daughters dating activities.

It could still turn out that the man is simply crazy for reasons unrelated to the girls’ dating activities, though we’ve been through enough of these stories now to have reason to think it’s not simple craziness that led to this. Sara Carter reports in the Washington Times today that police are starting to take notice of things like “sudden jihad syndrome,” which could lead them to examine similar and related pathologies. None too soon.

Sisters, Amina, 18, and Sarah, 17, were each shot to death. Friends of the girls say their father was Egyptian and critical of popular American lifestyles. “I’m definitely 100% sure that it was her dad that killed her,” said Kathleen Wong, a friend of the dead teenagers.

Wong says the girl’s father was verbally abusive and that Sarah, especially, lived in fear. “She’s always told me that she was always so scared of her dad,” says Wong. “Even at school if a teacher joked around like, ‘I’m gonna tell your parents about this’, she would like totally flip out and start crying like, ‘please don’t tell’.”

Also, Said was not in the Lewisville house that the police had surrounded earlier. So he’s still presumably on the loose. There’s video of their friend talking about the father at the link.

Update: A Hot Air reader found these pics of Sarah and her friend Kathleen Wong, just clowning around and being teenage girls.

Update: Once again from Fishwrap, we learn what we already suspected about the Said family’s religion.

“Amina was very nice with everybody. She helped me in [Advanced Placement English] class,” she said. Sarah was a sophomore when she took an Algebra II class with Liz, who was a junior at the time.

She said the sisters, who wore typical American clothes, didn’t talk much about their family. “I didn’t know they were Muslims until she told me they were Egyptian and Muslim,” Liz said.

The story has more detail about the family, the killings and Amina and Sarah. The girls’ friends describe them both as very bright.

This may sound crass and it probably is, but it’s one thing to hear about these repulsive so-called “honor killings” occurring in Europe or even Canada, but Dallas is my hometown. I know what Texas justice is likely to do with Mr. Said if he’s caught and convicted, but that won’t bring those girls back and it won’t replace the sense of violation that I personally got from what he did. This isn’t some place far away we’re talking about, it’s Dallas, the buckle of the Bible belt and a city that’s as American as you can get. To say that this act makes me angry gets near the surface of what it makes me think about things right now.

Update: From Amina’s MySpace page.

Update:Gateway Pundit points to another apparent “honor killing” in Chicago. This one doesn’t involve Islam, but rather India’s disgusting caste system.